Internationalization (i18n)

Making the World Wide Web worldwide!


News by category
News archives
Search news
The W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures.

From this page you can find articles and other resources about Web internationalization, and information about the groups that make up the Activity.
Read also about opportunities to participate and fund work via the new Sponsorship Program.

News

Last Call Working Draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 Published

This document defines data categories and their implementation as a set of elements and attributes called the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

ITS 2.0 is designed to foster the creation and localization of multilingual Web content, focusing on HTML5, XML based formats in general, and to leverage localization workflows based on the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF), and language technology applications like machine translation or named entity annotation. In addition to HTML5 and XML, algorithms to convert ITS attributes to NIF is provided.

Last Call means that the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group feels that ITS 2.0 is ready to move to recommendation. If you have comments on the document, please send them to the list mentioned in the document status before 10 January.

Tags:

New translation into Danish

This article was translated into Danish thanks to Çiğdem Küçük (Copypanthers). This is the first translation into Danish of an Internationalization Activity article.

W3C Workshop, Call for Participation: Making the Multilingual Web Work

12–13 March 2013 in Rome, Italy, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

The W3C announces today the sixth in a series of workshops exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture.

Anyone may attend at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees. Early registration is encouraged due to limited space.

Building on the success of five highly regarded previous workshops in Madrid, Pisa, Limerick, Luxembourg, and Dublin, this workshop will emphasize the application of theory and technology to meet practical needs. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. Registration now online.

Tags: ,

New translation into German

This article was translated into German thanks to Carolin Winterholler (Copypanthers).

Updated Working Draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 published

ITS 2.0 responds to current and future needs to extend ITS 1.0 by providing metadata (ITS “data categories”) for HTML5 as well as XML, using ITS data categories for RDF, and adding new data categories relevant for localization and language technologies.

In addition to various clarifications and smaller changes from the second version released in July, this third version of the document adds additional data categories that are now ready for review: Disambiguation, Preserve Space, Id Value, Target Pointer, Preserve Space, Localization Quality Issue, and Localization Quality Précis. In addition it adds support for the use of CSS selectors as an alternative to XPath, updates the ruby markup section to match the HTML5 ruby model, and simplifies a number of sections for greater usability

Please take a look at the new version, and send any comments to public-multilingualweb-lt-comments@w3.org (subscribe at the archive main page). Use “ITS 2.0 WD Comment” at the beginning of the subject line of your email, and add something descriptive after it.

Send any comments before the beginning of October. We are planning to publish a new working draft in October, and a feature complete “last call” working draft in November.

Tags: ,

New translations into Polish

This article was translated into Polish thanks to Biuro tłumaczeń Gdańsk.

Updated article: Background images that support localization

The article Background images that support localization was updated as follows:

  • A note was added at the beginning of the background section, mentioning that CSS now enables you to create the examples in the article, where appropriate, and that the article now contains pointers to live code samples using CSS.
  • The first sentence of each section describing a technique was changed to better position and introduce the section.
  • A sentence was added to the end of each of the above sections, pointing to an example of how CSS could be used to reproduce that example, for browsers that support it.
  • ” Internet Explorer and Opera will split the word and the hyphen will appear at the end of the line” was changed to “recent versions of major browsers will split the word and the hyphen will appear at the end of the line”
  • The section “By the way” was removed.

Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian translations need to be updated. Please contact Richard Ishida (ishida@w3.org) for the source text. In the meantime, the note and the link text have been added to those translations in English, but not the other additions.

Categories: Update, w3cWebDesign

New tests: Line breaks in CSS3 Text

Several sets of tests are now available related to line breaks, word breaks and hyphenation in CSS3 Text and Unicode Standard Annex #14 (Line Breaking Properties). Some of the tests are rewrites of previous tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite. There are also many new tests.

See the main i18n test page for list of tests and results for major browsers. The tests are also published in the i18n-css3-text test suite in the W3C Test Harness.

New tests: White space in CSS3

The previous set of tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite looking at white space handling for various non-Latin scripts has been rewritten and published today. The new tests are based on behavior described in the CSS3 Text Module. These tests explore, in particular, how browsers render text in Asian and South-East Asian scripts when white space appears at the end or beginning of a line in the source text.

A list of tests and a snapshot of results for major browsers is available. The tests are also published in the i18n-css3-text test suite in the W3C Test Harness.

The results page is the latest to be adapted so that the results shown are automatically pulled from the W3C Test Harness database when the page is displayed. This functionality has now been extended to all test results pages using the new format.

New translation into German

This article was translated into German thanks to Kamila Ścisłowicz (Tłumaczenia niemiecki).


Copyright © 2025 World Wide Web Consortium.
W3C® liability, trademark and permissive license rules apply.

Questions or comments? xfq@w3.org